=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #332
—April 8, 1993—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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WHY EXALT THE WISE USE MOVEMENT NOW?
Readers have been asking, why would the NEW YORK TIMES align
itself with the so-called wise use movement? (See RHWN #331 and
#330.) We can only speculate, but there are perhaps many reasons.
Perhaps it is partly because the TIMES itself is a major polluter
that was sued in August, 1991, for $1.3 billion by two Canadian
Indian nations who accused the TIMES of polluting their waters
and their fish with dioxins spewed from a paper mill the TIMES
partly owned until they sold their share in December, 1991.[1]
Perhaps it is partly because some individual TIMES writers enjoy
the simple rhetoric of the so-called wise use movement–the only
real problem we face is big government wasting billions of our
tax dollars regulating us to death. (Such simple ideas are
powerfully attractive; after all, such ideas kept Ronald Reagan
and George Bush in high office for 12 years while their friends
and associates, both Republican and Democrat, raided the national
treasury, which they refilled periodically by borrowing from
future generations, creating a debt unprecedented in the history
of the world.)
But perhaps it is even more fundamental. The TIMES is known as
America’s newspaper of record. The TIMES tries to comprehend,
and reflect American society, to hold up a mirror so we can see
ourselves. It is only natural that they select what they think we
should see; it could not be otherwise. What is the reality the
TIMES wants us to see?
Here is a hypothesis:
The main message of the TIMES’s five-part series was that “low”
exposures to chemicals and radiation are not harmful to humans or
ecosystems, at least not harmful enough to warrant the
expenditure of billions of dollars for protection.
There are two realities at work here. First there is Superfund,
the law Congress passed in 1980 to clean up old chemical dumps.
And second there is the reality of ongoing U.S. waste production,
which increases relentlessly each year at a steady 6.5 to 7.5
percent, total annual production doubling every 10 to 12 years.
Superfund: the Problem of Old Chemical Dumps
Superfund was passed in 1980 with high hopes that old chemical
dumps could be located and cleaned up promptly. No one imagined
that the problem was as large as it turned out to be. Congress
and environmentalists thought a few new technologies would be
developed that would clean up the problem within 10 years or so.
But as the 1980s dragged on, more and more contaminated sites
were discovered, and no technologies were found that could clean
them up. Between 1980 and 1986, $1.6 billion was spent but only
13 sites were cleaned up.[2]
In 1989, Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) pointed
out that numerous studies had shown that the standard remedy for
Superfund sites, a technique called pump-and-treat, was not
working. Pump-and-treat tries to pump chemicals up to the surface
and detoxify them. The trouble is, even after years of pumping,
sufficient chemicals remain underground to continuously
contaminate enormous quantities of groundwater–the drinking
water supply of half the American people and 95 percent of rural
residents (see RHWN #163). Furthermore, OTA estimated the size of
the whole problem and concluded that there might be as many as
439,000 contaminated sites (RHWN #272), plus six million
individual underground storage tanks, 15 to 25 percent of which
are already leaking (see RHWN #229 revised). In 1991 the
National Academy of Sciences confirmed that people living near
chemical dumps have been shown to suffer from “birth defects,
spontaneous abortions, cardiac anomalies [heart problems],
fatigue, and neurologic impairment” and that “some studies have
detected excesses of cancer in residents exposed to compounds
found at hazardous waste sites.” Furthermore, the National
Academy said, “Millions of tons of hazardous materials are slowly
migrating into groundwater in areas where they could pose
problems in the future, even though current risks could be
negligible.” (See RHWN #271.) (Another form of borrowing from
future generations.)
By the early 1990s, it was clear that the only way to achieve the
central goal of the Superfund law (to protect the public from old
chemical dumps) would be to excavate the contaminated soil and
store it above-ground in steel-reinforced concrete buildings.
(See RHWN #260.) This solution, however, suffers from a major
drawback: it would make the size of the problem visible to
everyone, and therefore eventually might create major unrest
among the public.
Therefore, solving the problem of old chemical dumps is now known
to be technically difficult, very costly, and potentially
politically explosive.
Exponentially-Increasing Waste
As the 1980s progressed, the size of the ongoing waste-creation
problem came into clearer focus. In 1973 U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) estimated the U.S. was producing 100
pounds of toxic waste for each citizen each year, a total of 10
million tons annually. But by 1991 the National Academy of
Sciences put the figure at 48,000 pounds per year for each
citizen, or 6 billion tons total each year. (See RHWN #272.) Of
this large total the petrochemical industry discharges an
estimated 400 billion pounds (200 million tons) directly into the
environment each year. If this waste were required to be
incinerated at a cost of $100 per ton, waste processing would
cost the petrochemical industry $20 billion each year. However,
in 1986 the total after-tax profits of the petrochemical industry
were only $2.6 billion, so $20 billion is simply not available
for waste processing.[3] If it is to survive in its present
form, therefore, the petrochemical industry must continue to use
the free services of the natural environment for most waste
disposal, which is in fact what happens: the vast majority of
wastes still go into pits, ponds, lagoons, landfills and sewer
systems, then into the environment. So long as petrochemical
products are produced in anything like current quantities, there
is no realistic prospect that the accumulation of toxics in the
environment will even be stabilized, much less reduced.
A Social Movement Seeking Justice Arises
Meanwhile, starting in 1978 a social movement sprang up around
Superfund sites, made up of people who had observed, first-hand,
health damage and suffering in their families and in their
neighbors’ families. These people naturally wanted cleanup to
occur quickly because they believed they and their children were
in constant danger. Even though less than 1 percent of Superfund
monies were spent on health studies, sufficient scientific
investigations were completed to convince a reasonable person
that many Superfund sites endanger nearby residents. (For
example, see RHWN #115, #127, #127 (second article), #272, #276, #313.)
As the 1980s progressed, the social movement that started around
dump sites began to recognize that its membership was not a
randomly-selected group of Americans but was disproportionately
poor and non-white or Spanish-speaking. The concept of
“environmental justice” began to occur to people, as they looked
around their neighborhoods and saw obvious environmental
INjustices. The NEW YORK TIMES reported the existence of this
social movement in a front-page story January 11, 1993 –some six
years after the movement began to describe itself in terms of
“justice” and 15 years after the movement sprang into being at
Love Canal. Curiously, in its January, 1993, story the TIMES
chose to portray this social movement as entirely non-white,
surely one of the greatest distortions the TIMES has ever put
into print. Why might the TIMES do that?
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
We can see that the influential leaders of American society find
themselves between a rock and a hard place. People are
justifiably frightened by growing quantities of known toxins now
measurable in their soil, food, water, air, homes and bodies.
People recognize that these toxins are everywhere, but are
unevenly distributed, with the poor and the dispossessed
receiving an unfairly large exposure. The poor and dispossessed
have grown self-conscious about their situation and have made it
clear that they intend to do something about it. They are
motivated not merely by a yearning to share in the wealth and
opportunity of this nation, but by the knowledge that their
health and the health of their children is what’s at stake.
Their movement is a clear case of the have-nots making just
demands of the haves.
This movement for environmental justice, as we have observed it,
increasingly employs the one tactic that major polluters have
never learned to handle: non-violent direct confrontation. Using
non-violence, people are demanding simple justice, and the voice
and visibility of this social movement is steadily growing.
What options do the leaders of American society (and, implicitly,
the NEW YORK TIMES) have? They could of course confront toxins
head on and begin to talk about the necessary changes, chief
among them pollution prevention, toxics use reduction (phrases
that never appeared in the TIMES’S 5-part series) and redress of
inequities.
Or, alternatively, they could repeatedly assert that “low” levels
of toxins are safe, and that people living near Superfund dumps
are simply trying to rob the public treasury of trillions of
dollars. Learning from the tobacco industry, they could employ
scientists to say that no harm has occurred to anyone, that
peoples’ symptoms are psychological or are caused by their own
freely-chosen lifestyles.
Or–is it too far-fetched and paranoid to suggest?–the so-called
wise use movement, which is not opposed to the use of violence,
could be incited, perhaps provoking a violent counter-attack from
those seeking environmental justice. So long as advocates of
environmental justice use only non-violent direct confrontation,
major polluters have no easy way of dismissing their fundamental
claims. But should this movement turn to violence, it could
disappear from the American scene within a year or two. Such
things have been observed in America before.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: ny times; superfund; remedial action;
pollution prevention; costs; landfilling; hazardous waste
generation; statistics; chemical industry; petroleum; oil